


drugs are better than friends

by arbitrarily



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Episode Tag, Friends to Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Pseudo-Hate Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-08 15:10:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20837582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: He knows what Stewy is. He's a fair weather motherfucker.





	drugs are better than friends

**Author's Note:**

> Set right after episode 2.06 "Argestes." Title from the very great Car Seat Headrest song "[((Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn't a Problem)"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOU158GJOGQ).

If Kendall wasn’t lonelier he might choose to ignore the knock at the door. Instead, he gets to his feet. 

And if he had the stomach for self-reflection, he would say that loneliness has evolved into a living thing inside of him. A fucking parasite, gnawing and insistent; it’s the only thing alive in him. He spent the rest of the night holed up by himself, burning through the Argestes-offered booze, willing his mind blank. The altitude makes his head hurt, or maybe it’s the coke. The lack thereof. Naomi texted him and he texted back. Back and forth and back and forth. She used more emojis than she did the English language. 

It has become increasingly difficult to spend time by himself.

Things moved fast, after the roast. They held an emergency meeting, cloistered in an empty conference room. Logan, his wrath all-encompassing and apoplectic, a smite-them-all and fuck-off sort of beast to be avoided as he stalked the length of the room. Shiv’s jaw was clenched tight enough to crack and Gerri hastily cycled through her phone like the next steps resided somewhere in her fucking inbox. Rhea flitted around, offering apologies that managed to sound both empty and sincere, and Laird—honestly, fuck Laird; he can’t remember a single fucking thing he contributed. Now, Kendall knows, it’s a game of fucking Russian Roulette as to who’s waiting on the other side of the door. Gerri, maybe, with more bad news, an eagerness to pour more salt into the already festering wound even if she’s the one tasked to heal it. Or, Shiv and her know-it-all mouth. Roman and his missing tooth. His father won’t come—he’ll send Colin to escort him to meet his rage. 

It’s none of them. It’s Stewy. He can’t decide if he feels more relief than he does disappointment. 

“What the fuck, dude. It’s late.”

“I know. Someone’s already in their big boy jammies.” Stewy pushes past him, so Kendall might as well shut the door. He does, and he looks down at his sweats. 

Stewy has already wandered in towards the table. He picks up the bottle, lets the amber liquid slosh before he sets it back down. “Despite your foibles, they still got you in quite the room, Kenny.” _Room_, like they’re at a fucking Marriott. Like he’s not staying in a fucking chalet or whatever the term of art is out here in the mountains. Kendall jams his hands into his pockets and says nothing. Stewy begins to slowly pace around the table.

“You know, you should feel flattered. Everyone out there is just talk, talk, talk, all about those fucking Roys, man. You’re on more mouths than that summer we tore up the Amalfi Coast.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I hear Daddy’s not feeling so good. That’s sad.” 

“He’s fine.”

“Right. Sure. I also hear your dumbass brother was trying to fondle some very deep pockets. You boys must be scared if you’re willing to crawl into bed with that walking Geneva Convention violation.”

“What the fuck do you want, man?”

Stewy holds a hand over his heart. “You wound me. I have come to offer my deepest and fondest sympathies. Because the last thing I heard is, much like your dead prostitutes or what-the-fuck-ever, the Pierces have decided to jump ship.” His mouth stretches into a false grimace, rich with mock compassion. “Condolences, and all that,” and then he laughs.

“So, what? You came here to rub my face in it?”

“No, no, never, except, yeah, most definitely. I also wanted to thank you, on behalf of Sandy and myself. It’s not often a man bends over and lets you stand on his back to score a slam dunk.”

“It’s not over yet, Stew.”

“No? What else you got up your sleeve? I know you already got Nazis reading your news, which, yikes, man, but tell me more, the suspense is killing me.”

Kendall can’t help but grin, closed-mouthed as it is. “Never thought I’d see the day you of all motherfuckers tried to claim the moral high ground.”

“Yeah, well, if I remember clearly, and I do, someone decided to fuck us all topsy-turvy, so here we are. The weather’s beautiful, by the way, up here on Mount Saint Stewy.” Stewy stills. He straightens his posture. “Which reminds me. We got unfinished business, bro. Your tab’s still open.”

“Nah, I think, I think anything we got’s closed. Bro.”

“You’re not gonna give me one good reason why? You don’t think I deserve at least that? You gotta tell me, because the curiosity’s fucking killing me—was all this because I didn’t vote to kill your old man? Because I told you. That wasn’t personal.”

Kendall starts to laugh, stops just as quickly. “You think I did this, I went against you, because I took your shit personally?”

“Come on, Ken. You take everything personally. I’d call it one of your charms, if you had any of those.”

“Well, then, let me put you at ease. It was business, pure and simple. I didn’t think about you at all.”

“Now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.”

“You played, I walked, and you lost.”

“It’s cute. How you really think that.”

Kendall frowns. There was a time when Stewy was the person Kendall knew best. Or he thought he knew him. Knowing Stewy has been a lot like standing on shifting sands even as Kendall tells himself the ground is solid. He still knows him well enough now to all but smell the desire to fight that’s wafting off of Stewy. He’s keyed up, aggression pouring out of him. 

Kendall crosses his arms over his chest. “So, is that it then? You came here to settle this like men?”

“‘Like men?’ Fuck you, what the fuck. This face? Doesn’t fight.” Stewy wags a finger. “‘Like men,’ Jesus Christ. Gonna get some fucking tigers in here, Kenny Roy headlining the Coliseum. The men oiled up with their muscles. Actually, you know what? I would like that.”

Kendall chooses to aim for shitty and mean. “Your girlfriend know that?”

Stewy resumes pacing, shrugs. “As long as I keep her well in stock of shit she can put up her nose she doesn’t care where I put my dick. Or who puts one in me.”

“Generous. I’m happy for you, man.”

“Now, you,” and Stewy freezes. He points at Kendall. “You’ve fucked me regularly and publicly since you tragically lost your balls, your spine, and most likely your dick across the pond.”

“You trying to flatter me? What am I? Some kind of porno Houdini?”

Stewy ignores him. His body language has changed. Vaguely lupine, his face watchful and critical. He approaches Kendall slowly. His mouth is harsh. That part’s new. Foreplay between the two of them has always been cloaked in casual cruelty. The kind paired with denial of what they both know they want and want to do to each other. The kind of cruelty you can only get away with when you already know the other person and you already know what’s going to happen next. Because Kendall gets it now, why Stewy’s really here. There’s a thrill of the unfamiliar all the same. 

“You know what Sandy said to me? After your little Daddy Knows Best routine? ‘That’s the man we trusted?’ He couldn’t believe it.” Stewy comes closer. “And I gotta confess, I spent more time than I care to fucking admit thinking about it. It _bothered_ me. How did Logan get you to change sides,” he snaps his fingers, “like that. Little bitch at his heels. It insults me, Ken, how much thought I gave you, after what you fucking did. And, eventually, I reached only one conclusion.”

Kendall lifts his chin. “And what’s that?”

Stewy’s too close to him now. That’s nothing new. It’s how he’s always known him, the two of them circling each other, well past acceptable social boundaries. “You’re a pussy. You didn’t want the company and you didn’t want the top seat and you didn’t want what I was willing to give you, you ungrateful fuck. All you wanted was Daddy’s love. And look at you, his little wooden boy propped up in his lap. He’s pulling your strings and filling your mouth with shit when he’s not fucking it,” he sneers. He tilts his head in towards Kendall, and in another, previous, chapter of their lives this might be when they would kiss. Instead, Stewy’s voice goes soft but no less insistent as his hand curls around Kendall’s shoulder. “So tell me, is it everything you’d hope it be?” 

Stewy’s never really understood Logan. Kendall knows that. Despite the stories he would tell him, the two of them baked and pliant, Kendall’s mouth hot and thick and used, or all the times Stewy came home with him, he never seemed to get it, not really. Logan was as abstract as any other concept of power—inviolable and immovable, and maybe for just as long, Kendall let himself think he could be something of the same. He hasn’t been able to think that for a long time now, and certainly not here. Not with Stewy pushing at his shoulder the way he used to, when he didn’t have the words or the lack of shame to say what he wanted from him. He never liked to ask Kendall for anything, not outright. And it always worked: Kendall always wanted to give. It was how you got what you thought you wanted.

Now, Kendall lets his mouth twist into something that passes as a wry smile. “Nah, man. Nothing ever is. You should fucking know that.”

Stewy’s hand drags up from Kendall’s shoulder, along the side of his neck, to close around his jaw. 

“I want you to know, I am never going to forgive you.”

Kendall tries to make that funny even when it’s really not. He tries to tell himself Stewy is boring like this; he doesn’t want him like this. His eyes are sad even as his mouth goes goofy and amused. “Yeah, what would the fun in that be.”

“You wanna finish this like men?” Stewy points to the couch. “Fucking bend over,” he says.

And, well, yeah. He has his attention now.

They started fucking back in college the same way other people fell down a flight of stairs or fell into a ruinous drug habit (which, technically, Kendall did do at the hands and the urging of Stewy, come to think) or even fell in love: they courted disaster, so of course it found them. They were careless, and they both were there. They each operated from the same basis that they were the only two people worth wanting and fucking on that campus, so why not fuck each other. That was what he knew Shiv would call drug-fucked logic—no basis in reality, but it felt as obvious and as right as any other high. 

“You cannot base your entire life on drug-fucked logic, Kendall.” That was one of the first interventions that resulted in one of the first rehabs, the one with the place in Montana and the horses and the bad weather and the meth tweaker with the scissors. 

Stewy never came around when Kendall was like that—morose and self-serious, drying out. He wasn’t of any use to him then. He knows what Stewy is. Maybe he’s always known. He’s a fair weather motherfucker. 

Stewy’s fingers curl under the waistband of Kendall’s sweats. His fingers are warm against the small of his back. Kendall’s front teeth sink into his bottom lip. Stewy’s unceremonious about it—he drags his pants down his legs to pool around his ankles and makes quick work of the boxer briefs beneath too. 

“Step out of those,” he snaps, drill sergeant sharp, and Kendall likes it way more than he would ever admit to anyone, including himself. Stewy nods towards Kendall as he kicks his discarded pants and underwear across the room. “The shirt, too.” And he does it, his body stripped bare, too hot and too cold all at once. It feels a lot like delirium, how much Kendall wants this and how much he wants to laugh. 

Because, for once, Stewy’s active, not passive, with him. He’s a lazy, demanding fuck, if Kendall can remember any of the times they did this clearly. It was Kendall, always behaving like he had something to prove if not something to lose, manic and near pleading as he worked his body or his mouth or his hands over him while Stewy took. 

Stewy has a similar mad, rictus grin on his face as he gestures towards the couch. He doesn’t even need to say it. Kendall braces his hands on the cushion as his body bends over the arm of the couch. He doesn’t move, not even when Stewy finally puts his hands on him. His grip is firm against the back of his legs as he works his hands up his thighs to spread them. Something over-warm and pleading sticks in Kendall's chest. 

His dick is already fully into this, pressed between his body and the couch. A dim thought crowds in the back of his mind that they’re too fucking old for this, but the thought is gone when he feels Stewy's hands grab his ass, his fingers trace down the cleft. Kendall's muscles twitch. Restlessness, so easily interchangeable for hunger, begins to build in him.

Stewy reaches and he cups his balls, draws his fingers down over the seam of them. “And here I thought Daddy kept these in his desk drawer.” He squeezes, edges against the border of too much. Kendall’s body jerks forward and Stewy clucks his tongue. “He let you out on good behavior?”

“Fuck off,” he snarls. "Fuck me, or fuck off.”

Stewy snorts and then his hands are gone. Kendall feels needy and exposed like this, but he exhales heavily at the sound of Stewy’s belt buckle coming undone. “Now where was this assertiveness when we needed it?”

He hears Stewy spit and then he feels it, his finger, wet, as it pushes against him. Not enough to sink into him, but enough to make Kendall drop his head and try to breathe in deep. When Stewy finally does push into him, the spit’s not enough. It fucking burns and Kendall hisses. Stewy chuckles behind him as he clenches down on his finger. He hears him spit again and then Kendall can feel it drip down. “Someone’s rusty,” Stewy says. He sounds nearly fond. His finger is a slow drag inside of him and Kendall finds himself bowing back against him. Wanting more; always that. 

Stewy keeps working him open, oddly patient even as Kendall tries to spur him on. When Stewy pulls his fingers from him, Kendall makes a sound too close to something pathetic like longing. He instantly wants to take it back.

“Here’s how this is going to work,” Stewy says, “you piece of shit.” The fondness has yet to abate from his voice and Kendall doesn’t know what the fuck to do with that. "You don’t come until I fucking say so. I’m gonna take what’s fucking owed me.” Kendall shudders despite himself. Shit talk is nothing new between them, but this variety, this particular spice is. 

“And if I do?” he says, the challenge of it marred by his breathlessness. His obvious eagerness.

Stewy laughs low in his throat. “You won’t. You’d fucking do anything for my approval.”

“Fuck you.” Kendall reaches down between his legs for his cock and slowly begins to stroke himself. He’s hard, he’s been hard, and the head leaks down over his curled fingers. “I’ll come right now. Watch me.”

“Look at the Two-Pump Chump acting like those are fucking bragging rights. But, yeah, if that’s what you want. I’ll leave, man. You, alone, the saddest billionaire in the world with his sad little cock in his hand.”

“You never seemed to find it little. I recall you fucking gagging on it, bitch.” Stewy laughs again, snide this time. He grabs at Kendall’s arm and pushes down in the center of his back. Kendall goes with it, stupidly hot for it. He lets Stewy pull at his arm until it twinges.

“Fucking give it up, man.” Stewy’s mouth is unbearably close to his skin. When he bites down on his shoulder it’s not a surprise but Kendall still grunts like it is. Grunts louder when he feels Stewy’s cock against him.

Stewy’s hand is surprisingly gentle as it smoothes down his back. Even as his cock fills him. Kendall aches; it’s been forever since he’s done this. He can’t decide if he’s missed it, or if he’s missed Stewy. It’s such an awful thought that he bucks back against Stewy, tries to get him to move. He doesn’t. His body is draped over Kendall’s back, solid and near still. Kendall squirms under him and Stewy shushes him, his breath hot at his ear, his neck. 

“Why’d you have to go and fuck this up, Ken? Huh?” His hips rock gentle against him, into him, and it’s almost worse than not moving at all. “You’re really never gonna tell me, are you?”

Kendall blinks rapidly. His arms have begun to tremble with the effort of staying upright. “Just fuck me,” he manages to say, his teeth grit tight. 

“Yeah, yeah. Fuck you.” And he does. 

They’re not talking anymore, just fucking, and it’s a relief. Kendall has yet to meet and know another person intimately where any interaction other than fucking is easier. Stewy is rough with him, and he’s stupidly grateful for it. He lets himself fall into it. Stewy makes soft, high noises against the back of Kendall’s neck while Kendall’s own strangled groans are muffled against his arm as he bites down. The friction of his dick against the arm of the couch is almost too much. 

For all his smack talk, it doesn’t take much for Stewy to come. His grip on Kendall’s shoulder is tight enough to bruise and the pain distracts him from the fact that Stewy is curiously silent when he comes. For once, he has nothing left to say. 

When Kendall comes, it's almost like an afterthought. 

He crumples forward onto the couch. Stewy’s body is too hot over the lower half of his. 

Stewy drags a hand over his face. He sighs. “Oh man. I should fucking kill you.” He says it with the same resignation that accompanies a closed door.

“Then why don’t you.”

He sits up. He slaps Kendall lightly on the side of his face. And then he’s moving, he’s already getting up. He’s already leaving. Kendall watches him. He’s not as lean as he was when they first started fucking, but then neither is he. His knees hurt, his thighs, his back. He’s tired. He’s so fucking tired. It’s all too much work.

Sometimes, Kendall likes to indulge. He likes to think about the other life he might have led. The one where he stayed, where he didn’t leave Stewy that night. It's not sentimental and it's not romantic, it's simply possibility. He didn't go. He didn’t get in that fucking car and no one died and the future was still something he could not only grab but hold. That’s all gone now. If he had stayed—maybe nothing would have happened. Maybe they would’ve fucked. The fireworks would have been far away and Kendall would have thought the worst had already happened: his family, their arms crossed against him; his father and his wrath, his hatred earned. And maybe Logan still would’ve found a way to ruin this, to ruin him. You’re never going to be your own man. No one needs to tell Kendall that. He knows that now. He fucking knows.

Stewy turns back to look at him. “The truth is? You’re not worth the trouble, Ken.”


End file.
